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Vanilla Forums Coupons, Reviews, Comparisons and Alternatives

About Vanilla Forums

Vanilla is a really simplistic forum software based on queues of messages. New discussions appear on top, and stay there if they are popular, or can be manually sunk in the stack if its author wants to. This kind of forum software is usually always simple to use and understand: no sub-categories, no big bordered layout... only the content counts.

Vanilla Forums is used by more than 414,000 communities today, including the VanillaForums.com hosting.

Vanilla can be installed in two clicks (a bit more, but we are really optimistic), and, most of the time, the only important settings you have to define are the database login/password, and your own administrator account. If this still looks too complicated or you are too lazy, you can leave your forum in the cloud by asking to the dot com version of Vanilla Forums to get a free hosted forum.

Plugins are also very surprising: most of the important ones are bundled with the default Vanilla archive, and can be enabled in one click. Furthermore, this is not just simple useless plugins but must-have ones, like OpenId, smileys, Facebook Integration,...

Vanilla Forums integrates with Zendesk and more than 4 other solutions. View details

Support Options

FAQs

Knowledge Base

Online Support

Phone Support

Video Tutorials

On premises Support

Security and privacy

Encryption of data at rest

SSL for all pages in application domain

Multiple Location Data backup

Ratings Summary

Relative performance in

Metric

Score

Rank

cloudswave Score

82

#2

Domain Authority

61

#9

Alexa Rank

97314

#17

Facebook

0

#0

Twitter

0

#0

Google+

0

#0

Integration

61

#6

Security

0

#0

Support options

61

#3

Platforms

90

#2

Show / Hide category leader in Radar

No
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We constantly strive to verify the reliability and trustworthiness of our data sources in order to help you make the best software selection decision. Ratings are also strictly independent from any kind of affiliation or commercial relationship with Cloudswave.

It was easy to get up and running in a very basic sense. After that, it was hard to customize notifications and the documentation for making custom headers and things like that was incredibly technical and not at all geared toward their less technical userbase.

What do you dislike?

The salesperson was incredibly pushy and kept trying to upsell us on features and moderation. This is because the very basics were not suitable as-is, making it virtually impossible not to upgrade to a more expensive plan. Their salesperson would routinely call me (after I told him not to and to email me instead) and leave voicemails. He also refused to honor our ability to cancel the contract even after I explained to him that we were willing to pay everything in a lump sum and cancel it. As I was attempting to do this and close everything out, he escalated the issue and made me feel taken advantage of. I would never recommend Vanilla Forums to a fellow community professional.

As a whole, I think that the app has come a long way since version 1. It’s kept the majority of its interface that was praised for being incredibly simple to use and that’s what Vanilla is pretty much all about. Though the price has increased and they don’t appear to offer a free option any more, the app seems to make up for this and offers a solution for those wanting to take full advantage of the simplicity of Vanilla’s core open source software without having to worry about getting it set up with their web host.

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